Disposable Diaries

Few people write a good diary these days. Sure everyone’s got a blog, but blogs don’t tend to contain many secrets. We want details, the gritty minutiae, the nights out and the hangovers – preferably bound together in book form. Thankfully Gordon Armstrong has given us just that. For a year – and still going on now, in fact – the illustrator documented his life with disposable cameras (56 in total), the results of which have been printed in a good-looking tome 1,468 pictures long. Disposable Diaries is a no-holds-barred documentary of modern living, and is well worth a good nose.

Among a mesmerising stack of new crisp new publications from Berlin-based publishing house Kehrer, is Jay Wolke’s Same Dream Another Time. It’s a nostalgia-soaked tome which takes a look back at three American gambling centres during the late 80s and early 90s: Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, and Atlantic City, New Jersey – not through rose-tinted glasses but rather directly, with an unerring, and often humorous realism.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a place of endless fascination, not least for Western photographers, who seem to make their way inside the country on a weekly basis intent on capturing for themselves it’s eerily unpopulated public spaces.

The independent publishing imprint that brought you the reissue of New York City Transit Authority: Graphics Standard Manual are back again with their latest addition to the series – New York City Transit Authority: Objects (NYCTA: Objects). The catalogue of objects, sourced and documented by photographer Brian Kelley, is the first of its kind and presents a previously uncollated archive of 400 unique artefacts all relating to the New York City Subway.

“I’m interested in exploring the connection between how we understand a text and how it appears visually. Design acts as a language that infers meaning and authorship beyond the words themselves,” says graphic designer Emma King. A recent graduate of Central Saint Martins’ MA Graphic Communication Design course, Emma works with language as a material for creating abstract patterns and exploring the crossover between print and digital publishing.

Bendik Kaltenborn is a name many of you will recognise. Maybe from the regular praise we give him on this very website, maybe it’s the visual language he has applied to Todd Terje releases, or even work for commercial clients such as Aesop. The illustrator has been freelance for the past ten years, and while studying for a Phd at the National Academy of Arts in Oslo he has taken the chance to reflect. “I wanted to take the opportunity to look back and try to figure out what the heck I’ve actually been doing,” he tells It’s Nice That.